POLISH ELECTIONS

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5307, 21 January 1947, Page 4

POLISH ELECTIONS

i pHARGES and counter-charges couched in most immoderate language characterised the long-drawn-out preliminaries to the Polish elections and with the voting under way on Sunday, they have reached an unprecedented acerbity. The confusion in the.minds of foreigners has become worse confounded by the varying accounts of the •voting as viewed by correspondents on the spot, but the balance of opinion is that the dice were heavily loaded in favour of the Government bloc, especially as

it is reported that there were no scrutineers for the Peasant Party on duty at some plaees. The proposal of the Workers' Party and its allies was that, with voting on the basis of proportional representation, jill parties should go to the polls on a single list. Thus the parties themselves would agree as to how many each would have in the National Assembly, and the Lublin group claimed 70 per cent of the seats !

j However, the Poles have j never in their history been logici al politically. Their first essay in democracy — one of the first in the world — foundered on the rule of veto, which meant that legislators had to be unanimous before a measure could become law. This ultimately spe'lt the doom of the once powerful kingdom and in three partitions, the ■ country finally disappeared, the i successive divisions giviilg Rus- | sia over 180,000 square miles, ; Prussia, 57,000, and Austria, j '45,000 square miles.

I In the 20 years between the ! time the integrity of Poland was ■ restored after the first world war, and the German invasion of 1939, there were great efforts to make the country powerful in the councils of Europe, but the economic and educational status of the peasant and worker remained abysmally low. i The second restoration of the land, unfortunately, ' has given rise to political aetivities marked by peculiarly Polish rancour. The Lublin Committee, sponsored bj^ Moscow, was at daggers drawn with the Government in exile, with headquarters in London, headed by General Sikorski, M. Mikolajczyk and M. Arciszewski in turn. A Cabinet of National Unity was formed in June, 1945, with the Socialist, - M. Osubka-Morawski, as Prime IMinister and M. Mikolajczyk, the Peasant Party leader, as his second deputy. The latter has been the spear-_ head of opposition to the Communist - controlled majority group. It has been charged against his party that it has . become a "catch-all" organisa"tion into which swarmed all the elements outlawed by the Yalta and Potsdam agreements and

that these were seeking to carry j on legal political activity along j with underground armed resist- i ance to the Government, anti- j Semitic outrages and a cam- } paign of assassination of Labour j leaders. These elements, according to the New York Times, include forest bands who hate Stalin more than they have ever hated Hitler, who hate Jews and who would not hesitate to plunge the world into a third war to recover Lwow and Wilno. M. T. Rek, assistant secretarygeneral of the Peasant Party until June last, who was one of a group which broke away from the party, told the Warsaw correspondent of the Times of London that his group saw the danger to Poland coming not from the Left but from reactionary elements of the Right. The parties •supporting the

Government, in their fear of these people, would deny them political rights. This was plainly stated by the Glos Ludu, the Workers' Party paper in Warsaw, when it said recently : "The future of Poland aS a democratic State depends on the general election of January 19. M. Mikolajczyk also claims to be in favour of social reforms and a democratic Poland, but the cooperation of hii? party with the Fascist underground shows the insincerity of his claims. People like him are not really inter-. ested'ln the prosperity of the Polish nation and they must not be allowed to take any part in its administration." In that last sentence appears to lie the motive for the one-sidede elections that have just been held.-